Henry Work

Henry Work is an R&D Imagineer for Walt Disney Imagineering: Research & Development.

Before working at Disney proper, Work was a developer for TouringPlans.com, the research arm of the Unofficial Guide series of travel books. We built some sweet web and mobile apps for touring theme parks. While I was there, I took up various side projects, including Instaparks.

Before that, Work and Mark McGranaghan built CrunchBase, a structured wiki project for TechCrunch. Henry worked on all their blog properties and infrastructure, and helped organize Startup2Startup, a monthly dinner event for silicon valley geeks, entrepreneurs, and investors.

For two years before that, Work was the team captain for the Northern Bites, Bowdoin College's RoboCup 4-Legged League team. In 2007 in Atlanta, they won the RoboCup World Championship. In 2006, they finished tenth.

Work graduated from Bowdoin College in '06 with degrees in Computer Science and American Government. I studied at The University of Otago in spring '05.

Latest from Henry Work

Startup2Startup, a popular invite-only Silicon Valley networking event, held its 7th get-together last night, bringing 140 entrepreneurs together. The event is the brainchild of Dave McClure, the venerable startup angel investor who recently joined Founders Fund, and the event sponsors include some of the top VCs in the valley.
The monthly event typically consists of a dinner, with an… Read More

The 2008 Rails Rumble, a competition for Ruby on Rails coders, saw 131 web applications launch into the wild this past weekend. The quality of the applications increased dramatically this year, turning the competition into something of a startup hyper-incubator, with the goal of producing apps that not only win votes but become sustained products.
The rules are simple: you, along with up to… Read More

Tomorrow Mozilla will launch a new geotagging project called Geode into Mozilla Labs that promises to leverage your physical location to enhance your overall browsing experience. More details will be provided in a post tomorrow, but this is what we know already: Read More

After missing a few weeks, Elevator Pitch Friday is back with a vengeance. This week’s featured video comes to us from a self-funded, young male oriented, yet-to-launch startup called BeTheBetterMan.com, with the pitch delivered by founder Eric Mayville. Read More

Six weeks ago we launched an API for our technology database, CrunchBase. The idea was to give away lots of clean, structured data about the companies we cover, data that could be used to build new services and improve upon existing ones.
Since then we’ve seen a number of impressive things built on top of the API. And the traffic has started to add up: between July 15th and August 15th… Read More

Today at WordCamp, a User and Developer 1-day conference for the WordPress blogging platform, Founder Matt Mullenweg announced impressive growth figures and reaffirmed Automattic‘s focus on fixing some of WordPress’s biggest weaknesses. The theme for the “State of the Word”, Mullenweg’s yearly keynote, was “Strong,” and growth from both WordPress.com… Read More

Today we’re excited to announce a free, open, and easily-accessible API for all data included in CrunchBase, our tech company database. It is available immediately to all developers.
Since we relaunched the property five months ago, we’ve focused on accumulating and structuring the world’s most useful data about technology. And we’ve worked to make this data available in… Read More

We’re proud to announce today a slew of new improvements to CrunchBase, our directory for information about the tech startup ecosystem.
Maps
Company and financial organization headquarters are now geocoded and locatable on an interactive map using the Google Maps API.
Say you’re checking out Yelp and want to see just where the company is located and what other startups are nearby. Read More

As Ruby on Rails devotees converge upon RailsConf 2008 (and the simultaneously held un-conference CabooseConf), performance startup FiveRuns is launching TuneUp, a “social” debugging tool for Rails applications.
The TuneUp plugin tells you specifically where a RoR app is running slowly. If you’ve coded a few ridiculously inefficient database queries, it’ll point out… Read More

We’ve been analyzing historical TechMeme data to dig a little deeper than the leaderboard information on the site that shows top blogs over the trailing 30 days. Mark McGranaghan and I are slicing the data in a number of ways and will publish it shortly on CrunchBase.
For now we thought we’d show a teaser – below are the top 100 tech bloggers/authors, based on the total number… Read More

Last night, Google announced App Engine, a hosted web application platform. We’ve now tested the service directly by writing and deploying a test application called appengine.crunchbase.com—a HotorNot popularity contest for startups. Our experience with building and launching an app is below.
Google promises developers two things with App Engine: to reduce the time from writing… Read More

Scalr is a recently open-sourced framework for managing the massive serving power of Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service. While web services have been using EC2 for increased capacity since Fall 2006, it has never been fully “elastic” (scaling requires adding and configuring more machines when the situation arises). What Scalr promises is compelling: a… Read More

The iPhone SDK event isn’t the only live blogging event today (though it did successfully bully HP Labs out of a morning timeslot), CG is live at a big event held at HP Labs, one of the biggest research organizations in the world. Looks like what’s on the docket is a big re-organization: with focus going towards more products and fewer blue sky efforts. But we’ll see. Read More

Yelp, the popular local review site, will soon announce a new $15 million dollar round of financing led by DAG Ventures. The valuation is rumored to be in the $200 million range. Yelp says that they will be using the money to expand geographically, add onto their sales team, and establish an office in NYC (they are based in San Francisco). This is Yelp’s fourth round of funding since… Read More

Instapaper is a cool new service taking bookmarks back to basics. If you come across some websites that you want to read but are too busy to do so, you can click on an Instapaper browser bookmarklet and then return to the Instapaper website later to read them. Think of it as Del.icio.us stripped of any tagging or social features.
Instapaper is a side project of Marco Arment, lead developer… Read More

EveryBlock launches today as a geographically-filtered news and data aggregation service for San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago. The site attempts to answer one deceptively simple question: “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” For EveryBlock, it boils down to three types of information: geographically-relevant news and blog entries, civic information, and… Read More

Pleo is a new $350 ‘life form’ dinosaur robot created by Ugobe. Unlike all the robot dinosaurs I know (e.g. the WowWee Roboraptor), the Pleo is not remote-controlled. It’s ‘self-aware’. It ‘evolves’. It’s also not very badass. This thing, in a very mass-appealing kind of way, is a puppy. Read More